Introducing the Monster Widget

An important part of the theme development process is testing. As a member of the Theme Team at Automattic I can say that we like to test everything we can! One thing that we have observed is that widget testing can take up a lot of time. WordPress provides 13 widgets, many of which contain a form enabling us to customize each instance. Populating a sidebar with widgets can be rather time consuming especially if you have to tweak each widget’s settings.

In an attempt to make widget testing faster and more enjoyable, we’ve put together a new plugin called the Monster Widget which consolidates all 13 core widgets into a single widget! The Monster Widget installs just like any other plugin and creates a widget that can be used just like any other widget.

This is the latest tool that we’ve created to optimize our theme development and review routine. We hope that you enjoy it!